This week, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), the industry trade group representing U.S.-based telecom carriers, equipment manufacturers and other stakeholders, released the widely anticipated results of its annual Wireless Industry Survey. CTIA’s study revealed that the U.S. wireless industry invested $30 billion in 2020 directly into wireless networks, marking a five-year high and a third straight year of capex gains. To date, the The U.S. wireless industry has invested more than $600 billion.
“These numbers show that while we were social distancing last year, U.S. wireless providers were busy both ensuring that wireless networks handled skyrocketing demand and constructing 5G networks, the foundation for our country’s post-pandemic recovery,” said CTIA President and CEO Meredith Attwell Baker.
Much of the spend is being driven by the ongoing transition to fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, which now cover over 300 million people. Reflecting the increase in mobile download speeds associated with this network standard, CTIA found that mobile speeds in the U.S. jumped 50 percent in the past year. The survey found that U.S. mobile wireless data traffic topped 42 trillion megabytes in 2020, an increase of 208 percent since 2016. Over the past decade, U.S. wireless users drove a 108x increase in mobile data traffic–a figure CTIA compares to all 72 million members of Gen Z streaming Tik Toks for 586 hours each.
While U.S. wireless providers have invested over $601 billion over the life of the industry, nearly one-quarter of this amount ($140 billion) has been deployed over the past five years. This amount is in addition to the nearly $200 billion in payments to the U.S. government via the Federal Communications Commission‘s C-band auctions for spectrum needed to power wireless network.
Much of the ongoing investment is being committed to telecommunications infrastructure, which provides the physical platform for 5G deployment. Nationwide, cell sites have increased by more than 35 percent, and in the two years since federal siting reforms were introduced, more new cell sites have been installed–a total of 417,000–than in the previous seven years combined.
Finally, CTIA found, data-only, “Internet of Things”-enabled devices account for 41 percent of all estimated devices, or more than 180 million devices in all. This is an increase of 272 percent since 2013.
Finally, the report spelled out a continued leadership role for the U.S. in global capex. The nation’s wireless industry investment in 2020 totaled 18 percent of the world’s total mobile capex, despite the U.S. accounting for just over 4 percent of global population and just under 6 percent of the world’s mobile connection.
